Zomato Raises USD 37 Mln From Sequoia, Rolls Out Service In 3 New Countries

Zomato, the online restaurant listing, search and review service today announced its fifth round funding of USD 37 million led by Sequoia Capital and participation from its pervious investor Info Edge (India) Limited. With this round Zomato’s total funding has reached 53.5 million. Zomato had earlier raised USD 16.5 million from Info Edge over four rounds of funding.

Zomato has also expanded its international offering in three new countries including Brazil (Sao Paulo), Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara), and Indonesia (Jakarta).

In all, Zomato service is now available in 36 cities across 11 countries that include Brazil, Indonesia, New Zealand, Philippines, Qatar, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, UAE and United Kingdom. Apart from Sao Paulo, Instanbul, Ankara and Jakarta, Zomato has expanded its services within UK from three cities to five, with the inclusion of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The funding raised will be utilized to further enhance their online platform and expansion of their services to 22 more countries across Europe, South-East, Asia, Australia and the Americas.

Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato commented, “This is an exciting phase for us. We believe that we can disrupt restaurant search with our rich content-driven model. This financing will help us develop a product that will change the way people look for restaurant recommendations around them. We are excited to partner with Sequoia Capital as our venture partner to help us succeed internationally, and we can look forward to seeing Zomato in many more countries over the next couple of years.”

Currently, Zomato employs over 600 people across 35 cities in 11 countries. According to the press release, Zomato’s traffic has risen by 300% over last year and currently gets over 15 million visits a month. Interestingly, more than half of their traffic comes from their mobile app, which clearly shows that mobile users love Zomato service.

In terms of revenue, Zomato has experienced a whopping 500% growth in their monthly billing compared to a year ago and their India and UAE operations have already broken even.

There is no doubt that Zomato is one of the few Indian startup success stories which has been able to successfully create their presence Internationally!

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin and Facebook.Arun’s Google+ Profile